Analysis of the Character of Hamlet Hamlet, often lauded as William Shakespeare's gr

Hamlet, often lauded as William Shakespeare's greatest dramatic work, is not the simple revenge play that it at first seems to be. Unlike the tragedy of King Lear, or even the romantic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, there is no clear resolution to the play's action, no clear sense that the something that is rotten in the state has been plucked out. Shakespeare's other tragedies tend to follow a more purely classical pattern in which a character makes a terrible mistake because of some inbred flaw and has to pay for this mistake (such as Lear's blinding pride and the tragedy that befalls him as a result). Even when the innocent die in Shakespeare's other plays - such as the deaths of Romeo and Juliet - there is still a sense that justice has in some way been served; the death of the lovers does seem to bring about an end to the feud.

But the world of Denmark as seen in Hamlet's court is so corrupted that it cannot be cleansed even by the degree of death that takes place in the play (Smith, 191, p. 29). By the end of the action Elsinore has been transformed into a garden of the dead, with the corpses of both the innocent and the culpable laid in the ground like terrible seeds. And there is the sense in the end that they will produce the same kind of fruit, that the decay will continue. This paper examines the incomplete state of Hamlet, the sense in the play that the death and horror will continue with the innocent as likely to suffer as the guilty. Some contrasts will be draw

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oyal line, but Hamlet is too mired in the endless demands of a maddening revenge that demands continuous new victims to see that Ophelia offers him the possibility of escape and peace (Garner and Sprengnether, 1996, p. 97). To understand the ambiguous nature of Hamlet as a revenge play we must look closely at the ending of the work. Hamlet's last words before he joins the accumulating pile of bodies in Act V, scene ii are "the rest is silence". In a classical revenge play along the lines of the Greek tragedies, this would have ended the play with some sense of resolution. Certainly, the horrors would still have accumulated before us, but they would be over with. If death had claimed the brave and wise and the innocent along with the foolish and the guilty, at least they would have all gone into the peace of death. They would have been released from the corrupting forces of violence and sexuality, released from all possible corruption by shedding their corporeal identities. But Hamlet has barely spoken these words of benediction and followed the others into the great unknown of death when Horatio immediately negates them. Hamlet has asked - perhaps even begged - for silence as his last request, and into this healing quiet Horatio

Category: Literature - A